CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

published: 04 July 2017

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01130

Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds:

Aesthetics, Affordances, and
Creativity
Rob Withagen * and Simone R. Caljouw
Center for Human Movement Sciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen,
Netherlands

After World War II, the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck developed hundreds of
playgrounds in the city of Amsterdam. These public playgrounds were located in parks,
squares, and derelict sites, and consisted of minimalistic aesthetic play equipment that
was supposed to stimulate the creativity of children. Over the last decades, these
playgrounds have been studied by sociologists, theorists of art and architecture, and
Edited by:
Harry Heft, psychologists. Adopting an ecological approach to the human environment, it is argued
Denison University, United States that the abstract forms of van Eyck’s play sculptures indeed stimulate the creativity of
Reviewed by: the child. Whereas a slide or a swing almost dictates what a child is supposed to do,
Erik Rietveld,
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands van Eyck’s play equipment invites the child to actively explore the numerous affordances
Anna M. Borghi, (action possibilities) it provided. However, it is argued that the standardization (e.g., equal
Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
distances between blocks or bars) that tends to characterize van Eyck’ play equipment
Alan Paul Costall,
University of Portsmouth, has negative effects on the playability. This standardization, which was arguably the
United Kingdom result of the aesthetic motives of the designer, might be appealing to children when
*Correspondence: simply looking at the equipment, but it is not of overriding importance to them when
Rob Withagen
r.g.withagen@umcg.nl playing in it. Indeed, a recent study indicates that the affordances provided by messy
structures appear to have a greater appeal to playing children.
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to Keywords: aesthetics, affordances, Aldo van Eyck, children, creativity, playgrounds, standardization
Theoretical and Philosophical
Psychology,
a section of the journal INTRODUCTION
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 30 March 2017 “We must understand that art and life are no longer separate domains. The idea that art is an illusion
Accepted: 20 June 2017 divorced from real life must therefore be abandoned. The word ‘Art’ means nothing to us. We demand
Published: 04 July 2017 that it be replaced by the construction of our environment according to creative laws derived from well-
defined principles.” (van Doesburg and van Eesteren, 1923; included in Baljeu, 1974, p. 147).
Citation:
Withagen R and Caljouw SR (2017)
Between 1947 and 1978, the architect Aldo van Eyck was involved in designing hundreds of
Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds:
Aesthetics, Affordances,
playgrounds in the city of Amsterdam. Although only 17 of his playgrounds are left today (van
and Creativity. Lingen and Kollarova, 2016), van Eyck’s project continues to have an impact on thinking about
Front. Psychol. 8:1130. cities, architecture, playgrounds, and children. Over the last two decades, the playgrounds of
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01130 van Eyck have been honored and studied by different academic disciplines, including sociology,

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Withagen and Caljouw
art, architecture, and psychology (e.g., Lefaivre and Tzonis, 1999;
Fuchs, 2002; Strauven, 2002; Solomon, 2005, 2014; Sennett, 2008;
Jongeneel et al., 2015; van Lingen and Kollarova, 2016; Sporrel
et al., 2017; Sporrel et al., unpublished). In the present paper, we
will analyze van Eyck’s playgrounds drawing upon these diverse
disciplines.
We will start with a portrayal of van Eyck’s playscapes in
Amsterdam, emphasizing certain aspects of them and linking
them to the architectural theory of the “humanist rebel,” as
van Eyck has been called (Lefaivre and Tzonis, 1999). Then,
we will sketch in bold strokes an ecological approach to the
human environment. This approach, which was initiated by the
psychologist Gibson (1979) in the 1960s and 1970s, provides
a framework for understanding the environment we live in.
Moreover, this framework can elucidate some insights from the
disciplines of art, architecture, and sociology. In particular we
will focus on two aspects of van Eyck’s playgrounds: the “open
function” of his play equipment that is supposed to stimulate the
creativity of the child; and the standardization of his equipment
that gives it an aesthetic appeal but might have negative effects on
the playability.
Van Eyck’s PLAYGROUNDS
In 1946, one year after World War II came to an end in the
Netherlands, Aldo van Eyck was appointed as an architectural
designer in the town planning section of the Amsterdam public
works department. Among his first tasks at this department
was to design a public playground at the Bertelmanplein in
Amsterdam. For this square van Eyck designed a climbing arch,
three tumbling bars, and a rectangular sandpit with a rim that is
lowered at two places to let small children enter it. Moreover, a
couple of benches were placed at the square, allowing parents to
look after their playing children (e.g., Solomon, 2005; van Lingen
and Kollarova, 2016).
The town planning section of the city of Amsterdam wanted
to have a playground in each neighborhood in Amsterdam, a
city of which parts were destroyed during the war. Although
van Eyck stopped working at the public works department
after 5 years (to become a lecturer in art history and start his
own company), he continued working on his playgrounds. In
the period between 1947 and 1978, he designed no less than
734 playgrounds in Amsterdam. Indeed, “the project took the
city by storm” (Lefaivre and Tzonis, 1999, p. 17). Besides the
impact that van Eyck’s playgrounds had on the social life in
Amsterdam, they were also of great architectural significance.
As the theorists of architecture Lefaivre and Tzonis (1999)
put it,
Even if for some reason van Eyck had not designed anything
but this galaxy of playgrounds, if he had not achieved anything
beyond this attempt to implant a ‘starry sky’ of over seven hundred
playgrounds in postwar Amsterdam, his place among the major
figures of architecture of this century would have been secured.
It is here that the major breakthroughs of an architecture of
‘community’ and ‘dialog’ and of the human and formal building
of the ‘realm of the inbetween’ take place. (p. 77).
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Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds
Aldo van Eyck was rebelling against the program of CIAM
(Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), which was
founded in 1928 and flourished in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the Athens Charter, le Corbusier opted for a massive
rebuilding of cities in which the functions of labor, living,
and leisure are spatially segregated, and street life was
reduced to traffic flows (e.g., Frampton, 1980). Although Aldo
van Eyck attended several meetings, he severely criticized
CIAM’s practices, and tried to replace it with a humane
architecture.
Van Eyck was very much inspired by Buber’s (1923) seminal
book Ich und Du, a manuscript that he started studying
while he was student in Zurich. Among other ideas, van Eyck
adopted Buber’s contention that dialog is foundational for
life.
There is only one reality between real persons – what Buber call
‘the real third’. [. . .]
The real third is a real dialog, a real embrace, a real duel between
real people.
Buber then goes on to state – and this is his crucial point –
that the real third is not something that happens to one person
or another person separately and a neutral world containing
all things, but something that happens in a dimension only
accessible to both. The in-between acquiring form (van Eyck,
1962/2008, p. 54).
Van Eyck developed an architecture of the in-between realm—
“Its job is to provide this in-between realm by means of
construction, i.e., to provide, from house to city scale, a bunch of
real places for real people and real things” (van Eyck, 1962/2008,
p. 55). In developing his theory, van Eyck emphasized that
concepts are needed that have a bearing on the daily life of
people. “Space has no room and time is not a moment for
man. He is excluded” (van Eyck, 1960/2008, p. 471). In his view
the abstract concepts of space and time need to be replaced by
place and occasion, concepts that “include him” and thus “mean
more.”
Aldo van Eyck’s humane architecture aimed at creating
places that fostered dialog and stimulated community life in
which children take part. Ever since the 16th century, children’s
play has been important in Dutch culture—several paintings
from this century onwards have children playing as their main
topic (e.g., Schama, 1987; Lefaivre and Tzonis, 1999), and
the historian Huizinga (1938) celebrated play in his landmark
book Homo Ludens. Hence, with his emphasis on children
and their playing Aldo van Eyck stood in a long tradition.
However, the goal he had was ambitious. As van Eyck put it
poetically:
To consider the city is to encounter ourselves.
To encounter the city is to rediscover the child.
If the child rediscovers the city,
the city will rediscover the child – ourselves.
LOOK SNOW!
A miraculous trick of the skies – a fleeting correction.
All at once the child is Lord of the City.
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Withagen and Caljouw
But the joy of gathering snow off paralyzed vehicles is
short-lived.
Provide something for the human child more permanent than
snow – if perhaps less abundant.
Another miracle.
van Eyck (1962/2008, p. 25).
Although the importance of leisure and children’s play was
recognized by members of CIAM, they aimed to realize it in
a completely different way from van Eyck. Le Corbusier, for
example, imagined leisure in “idealized settings,” often at a
serious distance from the houses of the children (Lefaivre and
Tzonis, 1999, p. 51). Van Eyck, on the other hand, designed
and created playscapes in the neighborhoods of an already
existing city, accepting and taking advantage of all the constraints
that come with it. Indeed, he followed Theo van Doesburg’s
dictum that all parts of the city are of equal importance and
should be used. Thus, contrary to the program of CIAM that
pleaded for a massive rebuilding of the city, van Eyck adopted
an “infill” strategy, using existing and ignored spots in the
city to create places for social gathering and children’s play
(Lefaivre and Tzonis, 1999; Solomon, 2005). During WO II,
many houses were destroyed and there were thus ample derelict
sites that could serve this purpose. Encouraged by the public
works department and the citizens of Amsterdam (who explicitly
asked for a playground in their neighborhood), van Eyck ended
up designing more than 700 site-specific playgrounds. There
are two aspects of these playgrounds that we would like to
emphasize.
Merging into the City
One characteristic of van Eyck’s playgrounds is that, although
located in a city, they were never fenced. This was rather
exceptional in the 1950s and 1960s. At that time the
contrived playgrounds were generally isolated places—they were
surrounded by a fence with a gate, and children had to pay
a little fee (or be a member) to enter it. Often a guard was
appointed who was responsible for the supervision of the
children. Van Eyck, on the other hand, strived at merging the
playgrounds with the city. The playground he created at the
Buskenblaserstraat in Amsterdam provides a nice illustration of
this (Figure 1). There were no sharp boundaries that separated
the playground from the rest of the city. The sociologist Sennett
(2008) emphasized this aspect and the role it could have for
children’s play.
Van Eyck intuited that such spatial ambiguities would also
provoke children to engage with one another, toddlers tending
to help each other crawl and totter about. This intuition was
elaborated in the making of the Buskenblaserstraat park. Here
a park was contrived from empty space at a street corner, with
cars flowing past. While the sandpit here is well marked and set
well back from the streets; equipment for children to climb on
has not been so protected. Cooperative activity—looking out for
cars, shouting, lots of shouting—becomes a matter of keeping
safe [. . .]. And just because in the Buskenblaserstraat there is
enough room for tossing and kicking balls around, kids have had
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Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds
to come up with game rules that permit play without their being
hit by cars. The architect, then, designed a park using the simplest,
clearest elements that invite its young users to develop the skill of
anticipating danger and managing it; he did not seek to protect
them through isolation (p. 233).
By not fencing the playing children, they became an integral
part of the city. Moreover, by placing benches at the square, van
Eyck created a place that invited parents or guardians to oversee
their children and to gather together. Street life and community
were stimulated (e.g., Solomon, 2005).
van Lingen and Kollarova (2016) recently argued that van
Eyck also established the integration of the playgrounds into the
city by two other means. First, van Eyck created play elements
using mainly metal and concrete. Contrary to the brightly colored
plastic that is so popular today in playground design, these
materials fit in naturally with the building materials of the
city. Second, an “urban character” (van Lingen and Kollarova,
2016, p. 68) of the play elements was realized by the use of
elementary forms (Strauven, 2002), a topic to which we shall now
turn.
The Aesthetic, Minimalistic Play
Elements
As mentioned earlier, van Eyck created playgrounds in existing
parks, squares, and other empty places in the city, taking
into account the constraints that were provided by these
places. Consequently, each playground was site-specific and
unique. However, van Eyck created a set of play elements
that he used and harmoniously combined in the design of
the different playgrounds. Among these play elements are the
above-mentioned sandpit, climbing arch, and tumbling bars that
were placed in his first playground. Later he also designed a
popular and widely copied climbing dome, jumping stones, and
a climbing mountain (Figures 2, 3). A characteristic of many of
van Eyck’s play elements is that they are often geometrical, giving
them an aesthetical appeal. As Lefaivre and Tzonis (1999) put it,
“[l]ooking at the configuration out of which the playgrounds are
made, we are immediately struck by the predominance of clear
geometrical shapes: circles, squares, and triangles” (p. 70).
Van Eyck was in touch with and inspired by Constantin
Brancusi. He dedicated his book The child, the city, and the artist
(1962/2008) to the Romanian sculptor, and included a quote
from him: “[s]implicity is not a goal in art but one reaches
simplicity in spite of oneself, by approaching the real sense of
things” (quoted in van Eyck, 1962/2008, p. 30). In his search for
the essence of things, Brancusi generally ended up with abstract,
powerful geometrical shapes. His well-known sculpture The Kiss
offers a case in point. Although the kiss has been a theme in
Western art for centuries and has been represented in all its detail
and gracefulness, Brancusi aimed to capture its intensity by “a
masterful elimination of anatomical features” (Geist, 1978, p. 12).
Even in the first versions of The Kiss, which are less abstract
than the later versions, there are no noses, ears, elbows, chins,
and throats. And this elimination gives the sculpture its impact—
“[f]ree of impedimenta, the image speeds to eye, invades the
mind” (Geist, 1978, p. 13).
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Withagen and Caljouw Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds

FIGURE 1 | Aldo van Eyck’s playground at the Buskenblaserstraat in Amsterdam. (Courtesy of the Amsterdam City Archive; reprinted with permission).

FIGURE 2 | Aldo van Eyck’s playground at the Laagte Kadijk in Amsterdam. (Courtesy of the Amsterdam City Archive; reprinted with permission).

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Withagen and Caljouw
FIGURE 3 | Aldo van Eyck’s playground at the Van Boetzelaerstraat in Amsterdam. (Courtesy of the Amsterdam City Archive; reprinted with permission).
Brancusi’s sculptures have influenced van Eyck in the
design of his play elements (Strauven, 2002). Indeed, one can
conceive of these elements as sculptures in the tradition of
Brancusi—abstract, minimalistic forms that similarly “invade
the mind.” In the remainder of this paper, we will analyze
these play elements from an ecological approach to the human
environment.
AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE
HUMAN ENVIRONMENT
In the 1960s and 1970s, the American psychologist James
Gibson developed an ecological approach to psychology. This
approach aimed to understand how animals, including human-
beings, perceive and act in their environment. As Gibson (1979)
started his landmark book The ecological approach to visual
perception,
This is a book about how we see. How do we see the environment
around us? How do we see its surfaces, their layout, and their
colors and textures? How do we see where we are in the
environment? How do we see whether we are moving and, if we
are, where we are going? How do we see what things are good for?
How do we see how to do things, to thread a needle or drive an
automobile? Why do things look as they do? (p. 1).
Gibson argued against psychologies that do not do justice
to lived experience and everyday behavior. Like van Eyck, he
criticized the concepts of space and time, notions that psychology
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Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds
had adopted from classical physics and that held it captive for
centuries. At the time Gibson developed his ecological approach,
cognitive psychology was in its ascendancy. This psychology
started from the physicalist assumption that the environment
is meaningless, consisting solely of matter in motion. To
understand how we experience a meaningful environment (full
of color, smell, taste, and so on), cognitive psychology claimed
that in the process of perception our brain creates a perceived
world—it attaches meaning to the stimulus information that our
senses receive. Gibson believed that this approach is misguided
from the very start—the assumption that “we live in a physical
world consisting of bodies in space [. . .] is very dubious” (p.
16). Indeed, in his view concepts like space and time are
“ghosts” (Gibson, 1975, p. 295), they have no bearing on the
everyday behavior of humans (see also van Dijk and Withagen,
2016).
In the autumn of his life, Gibson developed an alternative
theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the
environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale.
A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the
environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion
in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He
coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as
follows.
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal,
what it provides or furnishes, either for good or for ill. The verb to
afford is found in the dictionary; but the noun affordances is not. I
have made it up (p. 127; italics in original).
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For example, for a human-being a chair affords sitting, a
floor affords walking upon, water affords drinking, and so on.
There are two aspects of the affordance concept that need
to be emphasized here. First, affordances exist by virtue of a
relationship between the properties of the environment and the
action capabilities of the animal. Whether a glass affords grasping
with one hand depends on the size of the cup relative to the span
and flexibility of the hand—a cup that might be graspable for an
adult might not be graspable for a toddler. Hence, to determine
the affordances of the environment for an animal, we have to
measure the environment not in terms of metric units (i.e.,
meters), but in terms of the animal’s action capabilities. Thus,
an affordances-based description of the environment “includes”
the animal (Costall, 1999, 2004). Second, and related to this,
describing the environment in terms of the affordances of an
animal points to the functional significance this environment
has for the animal. It refers to what the animal can do in his
environment, what it means to him (Gibson, 1982).
Ever since its introduction, the concept of affordances has
proven to be useful to understand the environment and our
behavior in it (e.g., Kyttä, 2002, 2004; Rietveld and Kiverstein,
2014; Cordovil et al., 2015; Prieske et al., 2015; Menatti and
Casado da Rocha, 2016; Withagen and Caljouw, 2016). In his
study of the environment of children, Heft (1988), for example,
contrasted an affordance-based description of the environment
with a “form-based classification of environmental features”
(p. 29). The latter refers to our everyday description of our
environment. When describing a park, for example, we mention
a tree that is in the middle of a grass court, the lake, and
the benches at its side. Heft claimed that such a form-based
description considers the properties of the environment to be
independent of the individuals who use them, and, thus, “provide
little insight into the functional, and hence, the psychological
significance of environmental features” (p. 36). An affordance-
based description of the environment, on the other hand, is
relative to the user and puts the functional significance of
the environment center stage. Moreover, contrary to a form-
based description, an affordance-oriented one recognizes that
a single object can have different meanings to an individual.
As Gibson (1979) had already emphasized, a single object can
afford different behaviors to an animal. For example, a child
can sit on a bench, but can also step on it, and jump from
it.
Also in the context of architecture the concept of affordances
has proved its mettle, both in the analysis of the built
environment and in the design of it. Beek and de Wit (1993), for
instance, adopted this concept in analyzing the City Orphanage in
Amsterdam, another celebrated project of Aldo van Eyck. Besides
paying attention to affordances at the scale of the individual
(e.g., a chair affords sitting, a floor affords running), Beek and
de Wit (1993) also emphasized what they called the “social
and socioeconomic affordances” (p. 36). Aiming at fostering
social behavior and communication, van Eyck created many
little squares and meeting places in his building that afforded
(and invited) children to play together or to meet with the
caregivers. A studio that takes the concept of affordances central
in the design process is RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture Art
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Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds
Affordances). They conceive of “architectural interventions” in
the environment as the construction of affordances (Rietveld
and Rietveld, 2011). Among other things, they recently created
an office of the future which they coined “The end of sitting.”
Being inspired by a newspaper article mentioning the detrimental
health effects of prolonged sitting, they created a sculpture
consisting of slanted surfaces that afford working in several
non-sitting postures like leaning and (supported) standing (e.g.,
Rietveld, 2016; Withagen and Caljouw, 2016).
Stimulating Creativity
The above affordance perspective can help in elucidating some
insights from theorists of art and architecture. These theorists
have often valued the abstract, simple forms that van Eyck used
because it leads to play elements with an “open function.” As the
historian of art, and former director of the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam, Fuchs (2002) put it,
The playgrounds were fantastic because the objects were simple:
rectangular and round frames for climbing (the latter like an
igloo), a sandpit, a group of circular concrete blocks for jumping
from one to the other – objects that are not anything in
themselves, but which have an open function and therefore
stimulate a child’s imagination. A child sits still on a slide or a
swing: it is the object that produces the movement. Van Eyck’s
objects do not move, but they allow a child to move with all the
acrobatism and suppleness he can muster. That was the genius of
their simplicity (p. 7).
Studying the many pictures of van Eyck’ playgrounds and
visiting the remaining playgrounds ourselves, indeed suggest that
children use many of the affordances that the play elements
provide them. The rim of the sandpit is used by the children to
climb on, to jump over, to run upon, and also provided a work
surface while they are playing with the sand. Moreover, many
parents use the rim as a thing to sit on while looking after their
children. Another example is the “climbing” dome (Figure 3).
This element that van Eyck designed in 1957 was rather popular
in the decades that followed and is now placed in the garden of
the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Children climb on this dome,
but also sit on top of it, jump from it, and use it as a little house to
dwell in and to gather together. van Lingen and Kollarova (2016)
mentioned that some women also used these domes to beat their
carpets on.
However, and as mentioned above, Gibson had claimed that
nearly every object affords different activities for an individual.
This holds true also for conventional play elements like a slide and
a see-saw. Children can use a slide as a thing to climb on (using
the ladder) and slide down, but they can also jump from it after
climbing to the top (if the slide is not too high). Or they can climb
to the top via the sliding part using their hand and feet. However,
the fact that these conventional play elements are generally used
in a single way whereas van Eyck’s elements are often used in
multiple ways can be elucidated from a sociocultural perspective
on affordances.
This perspective was initiated in the 1980s and 1990s by a
number of authors (e.g., Heft, 1989, 2001; Hodges and Baron,
1992; Costall, 1995; Reed, 1996; Ingold, 2000; for some recent
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developments see, Rietveld, 2008; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014;
van Dijk and Withagen, 2016; van Dijk and Rietveld, 2017).
A central tenet of this approach is that the use of objects (and
their affordances) always takes place in and is largely shaped
by the sociocultural environment. For example, we learn about
the affordances of objects from and through other people. To
elucidate this point, Costall (1995) quoted Leont’ev (1981).
[The] notion of an individual, a child, who is all by itself with
the world of objects is a completely artificial abstraction. The
individual is not simply thrown into the human world; it is
introduced into this world by the people around it, and they guide
it in that world (p. 135).
A child entering a playground perceives other children using
the equipment and/or is introduced to it by the parents. Especially
in the case of young children, parents guide their child to,
for example, the slide, supports it while she climbs the ladder,
and encourages her to slide down. By doing so, the parents
demonstrate the child the function of the play element. Costall
(2015) called such a function the “canonical affordance” of the
object, to refer to its “single, definitive meaning” (p. 51; see also
Costall, 2012) within a social practice. Indeed, when a child uses
the slide in another way (e.g., by climbing up via the part that is
meant to slide down), many parents correct their children that
this is not how they should use the equipment—this is not “what
the object was made for” (see also Kyttä, 2004, on “the field of
constrained action”).
Van Eyck intentionally created play equipment that does not
have such a “single, definitive meaning.” He conceived of his
abstract play elements as “tools for imagination,” to use his own
phrasing (de Roode, 2002). As van Lingen and Kollarova (2016)
put it,
One of the most important aspects of the play elements van Eyck
designed is that they do not have a designated function: They can
be used in different ways, depending on the game you are playing,
and with their simple and abstract forms they stimulate children
to use their imagination[. . .]. Aldo van Eyck’s designs don’t aim
to show what they are and how they should be used, they rather
suggest what they could be (p. 48).
If we consider children playing on, say, the above-mentioned
dome, it is indeed hard to conceive of an activity (apart from
damaging it) that results in parents admonishing their children
that “this is not what it is meant for.” Of course, parents
might restrict the behavior of children playing on the dome—
after all, certain actions might be dangerous. But such imposed
restrictions do not relate to the fact that the exhibited behavior
is not in accordance with the function of the play element. Thus,
whereas conventional playground equipment, embedded in the
social practices, almost “dictates” what children should do, van
Eyck’s abstract, minimalistic equipment seems to stimulate the
creativity of children—it fosters the children to discover all the
affordances it provides them.1
1
A reviewer suggested that the open function of van Eyck’s play element might
also have a potential drawback—it might restrict the possibility of pretend play
(e.g., this pen is now a gun). After all, such play is facilitated by objects having a
designated function.
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Aldo van Eyck’s Playgrounds
Standardization and Aesthetics
Although van Eyck’s playgrounds were site-specific and thus
never standardized, the used play elements in and of themselves
often were. As mentioned above, van Eyck was very much
inspired by the simple, abstract though powerful forms of
Brancusi’s sculptures. He too created elementary forms that are
generally organized around principles of geometry. For example,
although van Eyck placed his jumping stones sometimes in an
irregular pattern (or used stones of different heights), he often
used identical stones that he placed in a figure-eight pattern
(Figure 2). Also in the celebrated “climbing” dome, the bars
are placed at equal distances from each other (Figure 3). These
symmetrical patterns certainly contribute to the aesthetic appeal
that van Eyck’s play elements have. Although the principles
that guide aesthetic judgments are complex, generally symmetry
is found to have a positive influence on an object’s visual
attractiveness (e.g., Jacobsen and Höfel, 2003), also for children
(e.g., Bornstein et al., 1981).
Yet despite the positive effects on the aesthetics, the
symmetrical patterns of van Eyck’s play sculptures are likely
to have negative effects on the attractiveness of the sculpture
as a play element. Over the last decades, several authors have
criticized the standardization of playgrounds. The landscape
architect Nebelong (2004), for example, stated that equal
distances between bars or jumping stones entail that the child
“does not have to worry about his movements,” which will
not prepare him “for all the knobby and asymmetrical forms
he is likely to be confronted with outside the playground and
throughout life” (p. 30). Moreover, and as mentioned above,
affordances exist by virtue of the relationship between the
properties of the environment and the action capabilities of
the animal. Whether a gap between two jumping stones is
crossable depends on the gap width relative to the jumping
capabilities of the child. And, obviously, children vary in their
action capabilities.
Van Eyck developed his play elements primarily for children
between 4 and 7 years of age (van Lingen and Kollarova,
2016) and was really concerned with creating the proper
distances between, for example, the bars in his climbing frames—
experimenting with his own children, he aimed to determine
the spacing (Strauven, 2002). And, for example, in his climbing
arch there are sometimes different distances between the bars
(Figure 2), allowing children with varying climbing capabilities
to play on it. Also, in the climbing mountains there are different
stepping heights (Figure 3). However, in many other play
elements like the above-mentioned jumping stones and the
dome, the distances tend to be equal, rendering the elements
mainly interesting for children with matching action capabilities.
One might argue that this is not problematic. Also in the City
Orphanage, van Eyck created places for different age groups (e.g.,
Beek and de Wit, 1993). In like fashion, one can conceive of his
play sculptures as elements designed for children with certain
action capabilities.
However, a recent empirical study by Sporrel et al.
(unpublished) casts further doubt upon the standardization of
playgrounds. These authors were inspired by an earlier study
that revealed that children created varying distances between
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Withagen and Caljouw
jumping stones if they were the architect of their own playground
(Jongeneel et al., 2015). To test whether children are more
attracted to such non-standardized configurations than to the
symmetrical configurations that van Eyck tended to design,
Sporrel et al. (unpublished) placed both configurations in a
public park. The standardized configuration consisted of nine
equal-sized stones that were symmetrically organized within
the form of a square. The non-standardized configuration,
on the other hand, consisted of nine stones of different
diameters and heights that were placed at varying distances
from each other. Sporrel et al. (unpublished) let children play
freely on the configurations and observed that children spent
more time playing on the non-standardized configuration than
on the standardized, symmetrical one. Moreover, when the
children were asked to rate how much they enjoyed playing
on the configurations, they reported that they liked the non-
standardized configuration better. In fact, messy structures with
a fair amount of variation in heights and distances afford children
to cross over different gaps. And such an affordance might be an
indispensable ingredient of genuine play.
Interestingly, and contrary to the above-mentioned studies
on aesthetics, Sporrel et al. (unpublished) also observed that
the children reported that they found the non-standardized
configuration slightly more beautiful than the standardized one.
This seems to suggest that the principles underlying the aesthetic
judgments are different when children were to look at objects
(as in most studies on aesthetics) than when they were to play
on them. What is even more interesting, though, is that Sporrel
et al. (unpublished) found no correlation between the children’s
aesthetic judgments and their reported joy of play. Apparently,
there is no relationship between how beautiful the child found
a configuration and how much she enjoyed playing on it. This
suggests that although designers might be concerned with the
aesthetics of their play elements, the perceived aesthetic is not of
overriding importance for the children who play on them.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In the present paper we have discussed the playgrounds of Aldo
van Eyck. As we have seen, these playgrounds not only afforded
children to play in the city of Amsterdam after World War II (and
stimulated community life), they were also of great architectural
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Conflict of Interest Statement: The authors declare that the research was
conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Copyright © 2017 Withagen and Caljouw. This is an open-access article distributed
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